John Ruskin, the nation’s finest ever art critic, should be remembered for
more than his wedding night debacle, says Alastair Smart

Be honest. I promise to keep this strictly between us. But when you hear the name John Ruskin, what springs to mind? His theories on art, architecture, the environment, social welfare and unchecked capitalism – in short, the wisdom that prompted Tolstoy to hail “one of the most remarkable men of all countries and times”? Or his infamous wedding night with Effie Gray?

I refer (as if you needed reminding) to the non-consummation of his marriage, apocryphally attributed to Ruskin’s horror at the sight of his wife’s pubic hair, which compared so indecorously with the marmoreal smoothness of Classical nudes.

The Victorian sage wrote so many books on so many topics, it can be hard today to get a handle on his beliefs. Much more riveting to focus on his bedroom demons, Ruskin being one of countless Victorian luminaries (Carroll and Carlyle others) whose hang-ups characterise that sexually tortuous era.

In 2013, author Robert Brownwell published Marriage of Inconvenience, a 600-page tome about what really happened in Ruskin and Effie’s boudoir, while later this year Emma Thompson releases Effie, a film all about their troubled union.

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In such circumstances, it’s easy to forget that Ruskin was perhaps the nation’s finest everartcritic: champion of both Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites. He also dabbled as an artist himself, as a charming new exhibition of drawings and photographs reminds us.

Ruskin demanded artists forsake beauty for truth. Their practice should involve “rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing, believing all things to be right and good”. His meticulous scrutiny of nature’s detail rather mirrored Darwin’s.

The invention of daguerreotype photo-graphy in 1839 proved a revelation. Ruskin was an instant devotee, revelling in these images – of previously unimaginable accuracy – on polished silver plates. In its early years, the daguerreotype was mainly used for family portraits, but Ruskin had other ideas. During the course of various trips, he took – or had taken by his trusty manservants – hundreds of photos of European hotspots.

Venice was his favourite, and Ruskin seems overwhelmed at the fact that, on returning home, he no longer had to rely on drawings or memories of the Doge’s Palace. With photography, it was “like carrying off the palace itself”, he said. “Every chip and stone and stain is there.”

It’s fun to see a man of such earnest erudition showing his childlike side. In his vertiginous picture of Palazzo Bernardo, taken from a gondola, we see him playing with perspective – like a boy with his new toy. He wasn’t averse to climbing awkward heights for a decent shot, either – witness his close-up of the Smiling Angel at Reims Cathedral. Indeed, so intrepid was he, Ruskin thought nothing of lugging his daguerreotype equipment up the Alps and taking the first known photo of the Matterhorn.

The chief purpose of these images was to illustrate his books (such as The Stones of Venice), as well as aid their writing.

Ruskin was also a keen draughtsman and he continued to draw even after discovering photography: a medium that rendered his sketches obsolete in terms of truthful record. Several are on show here, and I suppose there’s some interest in the way photography(consciously or not) started to influence his drawings – for instance, the heightened shadow effects in San Martino cathedral, Lucca.

But, for me, it’s the photos that stand out. They mark a blissful union of Ruskin’s aesthetic and scientific interests: like the happy marriage he himself never had.